How to make a saddle in Minecraft: three leather and one iron ingot
Saddles became craftable in Java 1.21.6, and the same update pulled them from five loot tables. The recipe, where saddles still drop, and the 11 mobs that wear one.
For most of Minecraft's history a saddle could not be crafted. That changed in Java 1.21.6: comparing the 1.21.5 and 1.21.6 client jars, data/minecraft/recipe/saddle.json exists only in the second one. In 26.3 it reads:
X X = minecraft:leather
X # X # = minecraft:iron_ingot
→ 1 × minecraft:saddleTwo rows, shaped: 3 leather and 1 iron ingot, with the bottom row of the grid empty. The result does not stack — a saddle stacks to 1.
Getting the leather
Leather drops from eight mobs — seven of them at 0–2 per kill, the hoglin at 0–1 — plus up to one more per level of Looting:
| mob | leather per kill |
|---|---|
| cow, mooshroom | 0–2 |
| horse, donkey, mule | 0–2 |
| llama, trader llama | 0–2 |
| hoglin | 0–1 |
The 0–2 range averages one, so a saddle is about three cows. Four rabbit hides in a square also craft one leather, which is the slow route if there are no cows nearby.
The same update took saddles out of chests
Diffing the loot tables of 1.21.5 against 1.21.6 shows saddles removed from five of them: dungeons, desert pyramids, jungle temples, stronghold corridors and ancient cities. The dungeon slot went to leather — 1 to 5 of it — so the crafting ingredients now turn up where the saddle used to. Where saddles can still be found in 26.3:
| source | chance |
|---|---|
| ravager | always drops one |
| master leatherworker | sells one for 6 emeralds, always in stock |
| Nether fortress chest | 33.3% per chest |
| abandoned camp chest (new in 26.3) | 27.5% |
| village tannery chest | 17.3% |
| fishing treasure | 1 in 6 treasure catches |
| village weaponsmith chest | 14.4% |
| End city chest | 12.7% |
| bastion hoglin-stable chest | 12.0% |
| savanna village house chest | 11.3% |
Chest chances are the probability of at least one saddle in a chest, worked out from each table's rolls and weights. The leatherworker figure is not a chance: a master leatherworker's trade pool has exactly two entries and offers both, so every one of them sells a saddle.
Which mobs wear a saddle
The item's equippable component points at the entity tag #minecraft:can_equip_saddle, which lists 11 mobs in 26.3:
| mob | what it needs first |
|---|---|
| horse, donkey, mule | tamed and adult |
| skeleton horse, zombie horse | tamed and adult |
| camel, camel husk | adult — camels always count as tame |
| nautilus, zombie nautilus | tamed and adult; a nautilus tames on pufferfish, 1 chance in 3 per fish |
| pig, strider | adult — no taming at all |
Llamas are not on the list (they take a carpet, and cannot be steered), and neither is the happy ghast, which wears a harness — three leather, two glass and one wool, whose colour becomes the harness colour.
A pig or a strider carries you but goes where it likes until you hold a carrot on a stick or a warped fungus on a stick.
Getting a saddle back
- Horses, donkeys and mules: open the mob's inventory and take it out of the saddle slot. Camels have no inventory screen, so for them it is shears.
- Any saddled mob: use shears on it while nobody is riding it and you are not sneaking. The saddle drops as an item.
- If the mob dies: a saddle you put on is a guaranteed drop. The game marks the slot that way the moment you equip it, so it never rolls the small chance that applies to gear a mob spawned with.
A saddle is only as good as the horse under it. The Horse Breeding Calculator predicts a foal's speed, jump and health from its parents with the offspring formula from the game code, so the saddle ends up on a horse worth riding.